Big Friendship: Summer of Friendship #3
7/10/20 - Days away from the release of Big Friendship, Aminatou and Ann share key definitions from the book and read a passage about a very challenging time in their friendship, early in the life of this podcast. Catch the virtual book tour and get a copy at bigfriendship.com
Transcript below.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Spotify.
CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
More on Big Friendship at BigFriendship.com.
HARDCOVER
Bookshop.org | Indiebound | Barnes & Noble | Amazon | Books A Million
AUDIOBOOK
Read by the authors! | Libro.fm | Kobo | Audible | Downpour | Audiobooks.com | Chirp
E-BOOK
Nook | Kobo | Amazon | Apple Books | Google Play | Books A Million
SPECIAL OFFER
After you pre-order the book, click here to enter your purchase info to receive a signed bookplate and a Shine Theory button and sticker!
Big Friendship will also be published July 14 in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. It’s available to pre-order at select booksellers now:
UNITED KINGDOM
Waterstones | Hive | Foyle’s | Amazon UK | Blackwell’s | The Book Depository
CANADA
AUSTRALIA
Booktopia | Dymock’s | The Nile | QBD
NEW ZEALAND
TRANSCRIPT: BIG FRIENDSHIP
[Ads]
(0:20)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Hi Ann Friedman.
Ann: Hello published author Aminatou Sow.
Aminatou: You know, it only took decades but she is here!
Ann: We're both here. I cannot believe we are having this conversation mere days before our book is out in the world, like what? What?
Aminatou: I know! I'm so proud of you Ann. Congrats on being a published author.
Ann: [Sighs] I'm proud of you. I am proud of us, let me tell you. Wow.
[Theme Song]
Aminatou: There are a lot of places in my life that I feel like I cut corners. This is not one of them. [Laughs] The work has been done. The work has been done. It was hard work. We support so many authors and talk about so many other books it's very strange to be on this side of the equation but also, you know, I'm excited we get to do it together. It feels easier somehow.
(1:45)
Ann: I know. It's also just now starting to feel real. I think for pandemic reasons and also just because it's such a weird thing to spend so much of our time and energy on this project, like behind-the-scenes for months and months and months and months, and then all of a sudden bang one day we're on FaceTime opening a carton of books with our names on them, like that feels very surreal. You just kind of . . . I think I had just kind of expected this day to maybe never come, like on some emotional level? I don't know.
Aminatou: I want the audience to know one of the reasons you are my person in life is that the first thing you got excited about, besides the fact there was a physical object that was a book with your name on it, was you were like "What is the ISBN?" I was like this is my person. Library nerds for life. [Laughter]
Ann: I truly was like this moment when our ISBN becomes real, when two become one. ISBN.
Aminatou: When two become one! I need some ISBN like I've never needed love before.
Ann: Oh my god, where are we shelved?
Aminatou: Want to make books with you baby. [Laughter] I can continue singing this bad song for you.
Ann: Wow, this is maybe the theme song for this book in a way I had not fully grappled with before.
Aminatou: Oh my god, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, When Two Become One: The Sequel. Well, okay, you know, let's talk about it.
Ann: I've got a question to ask you. Do you want to read the definition of big friendship that appears at the beginning of our book? Because I feel like that is a good frame for setting up what this thing is all about.
Aminatou: Wow, let me crack open this copy for you.
Ann: Screaming.
Aminatou: I'm reading from a physical book.
Ann: Opening book sound. Pages sounds.
Aminatou: Pages. Pages are opening. You know, for someone who does a podcast it's really funny how nervous I am about reading out loud because it turns out I don't know how to read out loud, a real skill people should have.
Ann: It's a different skill set.
(3:50)
Aminatou: It's like other people reading to me is my love language. It turns out I should've been reading to other people all along but here we go. "Big friendship is a bond of great space, force, and significant that transcends life phases, geography, and emotional shifts. It is large in dimension affecting most aspects of each person's life. It is full of meaning and resonance. A big friendship is reciprocal with both parties feeling worthy of each other and willing to give of themselves in generous ways. A big friendship is active, hearty, and almost always a big friendship is mature. Its advanced age commands respect and predicts its ability to last far into the future."
Ann: We came up with a whole new term. [Laughs]
Aminatou: Why do we have a definition in this book, Ann?
Ann: Great question Aminatou. Everyone who listens to this podcast knows we employ a lot of other terminology for our close friends. We say a podcast for long-distance besties everywhere or we say close friends or I think we have definitely used the term BFF, maybe kind of tongue-in-cheek, but we've used all those labels for friendship on the show before. And when we sat down to think about writing this book and about why friendship is not really given the respect and attention and investment that some other relationships are in our society we realized that part of it is a problem of definition, that these terms for really big and important and life-shaping friendships are kind of the same for friendships that last just a couple years or a really intense youthful bond that you have that isn't really sustained or, God, in some cases even just a person you barely know on the Internet is labeled friend. And so we really wanted to say actually we're talking about this specific category within friendship and we're going to call it a big friendship and in order to kind of narrow down what this book is really about and who we're really talking about investing in we had to get into it. We had to like, you know, really kind of pick apart what makes a big friendship different than other kinds of friendship.
(6:00)
Aminatou: Yeah, that sounds fair and accurate. Love to agree with you on all things. [Laughs]
Ann: Do you think we missed anything in this definition?
Aminatou: You know, upon reflection one thing that we definitely write about a lot in the book but it is not included in the definition is that we also believe that big friendship is not an exclusive kind of relationship you can have with someone. But I think part of why it's not in the definition is we are both people who think that friendship should be very big in general and you should have a lot of people in your life and you . . . you know, we just don't believe in this weird tier system of there is only one person who is exclusively important to you. Polyamory but friendship, you know? Make it consensual, make it sexy, make it big. Yeah.
Ann: And what is the Greek-rooted word for that, polyplutonic? Like what is the . . .
Aminatou: Poly . . . someone who is better at these words please come up with that. But you know what I mean? Like that whole thing that is basically the deep root essentially of the Mean Girls construct of friendship, right, is you are supposed to all be fighting for the attention of one person somehow. Like there's just one thing that should bond all of you. What I'm saying is that I don't agree with that. I just think that I have a lot of different friends who whole different parts of may attention and I have varied relationships with them and they're all people that I am a whole person because I have all of those different friendships in my life. And so I think that so much of acknowledging big friendship is also talking about how it is possible -- it's not necessary, but it is possible to have more than one person who is this kind of friend to you.
(7:45)
Ann: Hmm, and that's definitely true of the two of us. It was interesting, so like this book is a memoir of our decade-plus of friendship and it's also some of these bigger thoughts about what it means to be in a friendship like this and its place in society. And I had some other conversations with my other big friends who read early versions of it, in particular Bridget who you met in the last episode she made a comment where she was like "Oh I really had to keep reminding myself that this is a book where the lens is focused on you and Amina and it's really about your friendship. It's not you've written a memoir about all the friends in your life or Amina's written a memoir about all the friends in her life. You've really kind of focused in on this."
I think one reason why we want to talk about the non-exclusivity part of it is because if you're listening to this podcast you probably have an impression that we are each other's number one and there's no one else in the picture or something because we're talking to each other in this space every week. And the truth is yes we do have a very powerful and important and life-shaping friendship but we both enjoy that status and that level of bond with other people as well.
And so it's a really interesting thing to kind of say like, you know, I've been asking myself what does the version of big friendship co-written with one of my other close friends look like and sound like? And what are the pain points we'd talk about? And what are the folkloric stories we'd tell about our friendship? How does this book apply to beyond you and me? And that exercise has been kind of interesting because I hope that's how everyone reads it frankly.
Aminatou: Yeah, you know, a really powerful experience for mew as when we were on tour last year in Austin and onstage you got to ask one of my biggest friends, Brittany, about the experience essentially of what does it feel like to know that you share this emotional custody with someone else? And, you know, it's obviously a conversation that I have had with Brittany before, it's a conversation I've had with other friends, but it's not a conversation I had ever heard the other parties involved in.
(9:55)
And so it was really . . . you know, it was definitely a little intense because I was like oh my god, these are not things we talk about, the three of us together, but I got to eavesdrop on it and it was such a reminder for me that my friends are so generous. They're just so, so generous. And Brittany just being real about oh yeah, I watched you have this other public kind of friendship with someone that is very different from the friendship that we have and understanding that that is something that doesn't mean Brittany and I are not very, very close. And also you and Brittany are very close now so there's also just this idea of man, like all of the friends are essentially kind of in-laws, you know? So we care about each other's well-being. You care about the big things that are happening in your other -- you know, your big friends' big friends' lives. And it just made me feel that for as much as life can be really difficult and there is strife in a lot of things that people also just really step up to the plate in being adults and in being generous and just sharing of themselves. And something that I think there's a world in which a lot of our other friends can feel really excluded from, you know, us working together and us sharing this very weird existence that we have.
Ann: [Laughs]
Aminatou: Like we're known for being public friends in this big way and it's . . . strange is the word I keep using for it because it is very weird. The public perception of our lives obviously does not match up to the private reality of our lives and then you're reminded of it in ways like this.
Ann: I love that you brought this up because I had jokingly said to you earlier are we going to talk about how we've been lying to our listeners all this time? [Laughs]
Aminatou: Ugh, you're just trolling. You're trolling me because you know this is such a trigger for me. [Laughter]
Ann: To be clear we have not been lying to you about our relationship. We are in fact real human beings who are friends with each other. We were not grown in a lab or put together like a '90s boy band but the root of that question is about the fact that so much of this book and particularly I would say the last third of it or so is about difficulties that we've had in our friendship. And really the first half is about us exploring kind of in some ways how we set ourselves up to have communication breakdowns and difficulties at other points in our friendship.
(12:25)
And I feel like it's interesting, we had to kind of write our way to a lot of that stuff. Originally this book was a little bit more of a celebration of friendship and I think it is still that but there is a huge, huge part of it that is about acknowledging the fact that it is really hard in real-time, and especially in public in real-time, to figure out where the disconnects are in a friendship and how to address them between you let alone address them in real-time in a public-facing way.
And so this book has been a real gift in the sense that even though we are talking week in and week out about all kinds of things that are happening beyond our friendship this book is really a chance to do what a podcast in real-time will not allow which is turn the lens a little bit more on ourselves and our past and sort of say okay, what was really going on there? [Laughs] And I actually don't think that's something that anyone can do in real-time and do it really well, like you need a little bit of time to pass. And so this book is something that could've only appeared in book form, like could've never been a real-time conversation on the podcast. And the kind of problems we talk about are things that maybe kind of creep in at the edges of the show but we've done very few episodes that are explicitly about a lot of the things that we write about here. How are you feeling about everything that's in this book being public now?
(13:55)
Aminatou: I mean I feel good about it. I also feel that you are correct. The reason that they are now publicly available in a book is there's not really a way to explore that in a podcast right? And for as much as whenever I hear that like "Oh my god, have you been lying to the audience?" question.
Ann: [Laughs] Me just provoking you.
Aminatou: Right, you provoking me. I think part of the . . . I'm going to be honest, the reason that I chafe so much at that construct is that I think that when you are people who make media and specifically when you are women who make media there's just an expectation that you have no privacy, you know? Or the product that you're making is not an editorial product.
Ann: Right, that honesty means sharing every single thing.
Aminatou: Right. You know, I'm like maybe it's because I'm not American, maybe it's because whatever, but over-sharing is not a culture that I understand. I understand that we have created a cottage industry of oversharing and how we reward people processing out loud what is happening in their lives and really I think that for a lot of women it is a really important conduit into making media because it's one of the few lanes that essentially we allow women media makers to be themselves. It's like tell me about your pain. Tell me about your strife. Tell me about the intimate details about your life.
And that is something I have always resisted and so I know that it's both, you know, it's like a personal preference of mine but I also think that so much of that question is also shifting the lens on the audience, you know? And saying be a critical consumer of everything that you have. If you . . . I think that people who listen carefully to this show, hopefully I think it comes across that we really pick and choose what we talk about. That is on purpose. Even though it's a show that is about you and me and we talk about our friendship a lot and the frame really is that we are friends, I also think that six years in it is fair to say that we make careful and thoughtful decisions about the things that we talk about every week. We don't show up and fly by the seat of our pants at ooh, tell me what's going on in your life. No, it's a conversation that involves you and me, involves Gina, involves a lot of other factors.
(16:20)
And so I personally have always just really resisted this idea that because I am a woman who is candid about a lot of things in my life that it means that I owe everyone that I don't know every single detail about my life. I also understand that because I am candid about so many things like money or sex or, I don't know, emotional insight that I have I understand that not everyone understands that e everybody has a process for how they do that. I was like when I share something that is "taboo" or seems like a thing that whenever the people say "Ooh, that's so brave, like brave thought," the only reason for me personally that I can do that is because I have processed it in private.
Ann: Right, it's in the past.
Aminatou: Yeah, I'm like it's literally in the past. It does not hurt. It is something that I have been really sitting with and contending with for a long time and for my own mental health it's important to me that I protect myself and I protect the things that I share. A lot of people make that calculus every single day. I also in the conversation that we had about celebrity gossip and so many of the conversations we have about what are the expectations we have of people who are public, I think too that as a society -- and I count myself as part of this because I am also guilty of it -- we are really hypocritical about the expectation of privacy that we have for ourselves versus the expectation of privacy that we extend to other people. Other people's lives are just very juicy fodder for let's talk about gossip and you and I are, because we are people who make media, are people who are gossiped about a lot. You know, and some of it I'm like I really don't care, you don't know who I am. And some of it is also very much like wow, we are literally kind of two nobodies. Why are you talking about the life of someone who is . . . we are not doing anything that is publicly noteworthy.
Ann: Beg to differ. We wrote a book okay? We wrote a book. [Laughs]
(18:20)
Aminatou: I know. But you know what I mean? You know what I mean, people who are in public because they are performers and people who are in public because they want to share their ideas. I'm not saying that people who are performers don't deserve privacy; I'm just saying the ways that we shape our ideas of who is a public person is changing in real-time. A decade ago two people doing a podcast would not be seen as a serious media enterprise or a content creation enterprise. It would really just be like oh, you two have a cutesy blog somewhere that people read, that we are really watching the professionalization of media like in this way that is super, super, super public. But that's a rant for another day. Back to your core question of have we not been sharing a lot of things that were going on with us? The answer is absolutely yes.
Ann: [Laughs]
Aminatou: In fact I would say we do not share 99 percent of what's happening with us because that is not . . . 1) we don't owe it to anyone and 2) we're also just human beings who are trying to figure it out. And so I was excited to explore a lot of this stuff in the book because it's a format that is just better for, you know, ideas like this. No one is giving their friend a podcast being like "Listen to episode 117 of this thing. Here, I'm handing it off to you."
Ann: People do that though! People actually do that. I'm sorry, I do that sometimes.
Aminatou: Listen, people do it. I'm just saying it does not stay with you in the same way it stays when you . . . there are works that are written down that you can give to someone that you can come back to all the time in a format that is probably going to last longer than the audio format, no shade to the beautiful people who try to make podcasts.
(20:00)
Ann: Nothing against this format we are currently participating in. [Laughs]
Aminatou: Yeah, nothing against this format. I'm just like in 100 years when the format fetishist wars happen will this survive? Unclear.
Ann: Are there too many podcasts? Question mark.
Aminatou: I'm going to bet on the written word. I also think that in the ways you and I are also very big journalers I think that processing a lot of your ideas like in writing is very different from the thing we do on the show which is just talk. Sure it's organized talk. You would not know that listening to me. But to go back to this thing of it feels safe, it feels fine to share, it's because you and I have processed a lot of this really hard stuff. And my favorite part of this process honestly besides getting to work with you every day was really that feeling of coming back to something that in real-time was so painful and being able to write about it with you and being like wow, that is so far away. It's such a long time. It does not hurt anymore and I am not bitter about it at all. And in a way I would not say I'm glad to go through hard things but I really cherish the realization that oh, everything that hurts you in real-time, it is possible for that hurt to lesson over time and for you to actually gain some very meaningful insight from it.
And the thing that our friendship has taught me and the thing I think I'm constantly learning about every kind of relationship under the sun is that there is no such thing as an ideal romanticized relationship. Everyone has some kind of strife and everyone is dealing with it. I have a real tendency to really just idealize a certain kind of -- you know, a certain kind of relationship. I'm always like oh, these people's lives seem charmed or this situation seems like it's perfect. And I think that complicating my understanding a little bit, you know, now I can look at relationships I idealize and say oh, these two work really hard to make sure they have a healthy and good relationship and changing that frame has been for me really useful.
(22:15)
So much of the work of this book for me was realizing there are a lot of things I need to give up in the way that I think about two people being together, particularly in friendship. And friendship is beautiful. It is -- has all of the rom-com energy that you want but it's also work and that work is really painful sometimes and also deeply rewarding.
Ann: It's interesting because hearing you talk about the rear view mirror feelings about the pain that we felt at various points in this friendship, I think that's really at the forefront for me when I think about other people reading this book. Because such a dominant feeling for both of us when our friendship was not doing great was loneliness and there are a lot of reasons for that. Some of it is to do with the fact that we don't like to gossip among our mutual friends and so we weren't talking to people in our lives about what was happening between the two of us and so we were just kind of privately emotionally barfing into our journals and fretting about it. Personally me shredding my cuticles and like, you know, at varying points putting my head in the sand.
But that kind of loneliness is not something you can really fix. That's part of the pain of going through an experience where only the two of you understand what the relationship is like from the inside. But I also think part of the goal in the book is to kind of say pain within friendship is real. It is not like good or something you should strive for but it is pretty normal that if you are intimately known by another person you will both at some point screw up and hurt each other's feelings, and I think we're really just hoping to do that is to kind of say you feel lonely in this friendship but you are not the only one who has had this kind of feeling that is not reflected in the wider world. We hope this book is now a reflection of that.
(24:12)
There's that cheesy adage of write the book you have needed at some point in your life. And even though I don't think every word in this book is perfect or we really . . . we wrote the absolute best possible book about friendship that anyone could ever write, I don't think those things are true, but I do think we really did write a book that would've helped us a lot when we were in this really painful place together. And now I'm getting emotional. That is something I do feel, beyond just the accomplishment of you and me doing this thing together, that's something that I feel very proud of.
Aminatou: Ann I wholeheartedly agree. We are going to take a quick break but first I have a favor to ask, or rather we have a favor to ask.
Ann: [Laughs] Me too. Me too.
Aminatou: You know, I hate to ask the favor alone so Ann and I are asking a favor. For episodes that are later this summer we're looking for questions and stories from long-term close friends. You can call and leave us a voicemail about a rough patch you made it through together. We want to hear all of it: the easy stuff, the hard stuff. You know, just be heard and talk to us. You can call us at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. Or you can record a voice memo and email it to us at callyrgf@gmail.com.
[Ads]
(28:20)
Aminatou: Ugh, it's so good to be back. Ann, do you think you could read some of our prologue? Maybe we should just read the whole prologue of this book. How do you feel about doing a reading?
Ann: I love that because, you know, we are not going on a physical tour for this book which usually involves standing in a very lovely independent bookstore and reading the words that we wrote together. So yeah, so let's definitely do a little reading just for like the world of CYG right now.
Aminatou: I'm already sweating because you know my feelings about reading out loud.
Ann: I love your reading out loud voice. Okay, here's the prologue. "It should've been a perfect weekend. The entrance to the spa was a white mission-style building with a wide, arched doorway and the words Natural Baths in relief above. Beyond it was the real draw, an Olympic-sized mineral pool with licks of steam slowly peeling off of it. The scene was ringed with hills and palms and as the Northern California sun dipped behind the pines there we were: two women sitting on parallel beds in one of the picture-perfect cottages on the property. We were each wrapped in a fluffy-white bathrobe. Ann was on the phone ordering a pizza and a Caesar salad and Aminatou was deciding what movie to watch. The only thing on the schedule for the next 48 hours was a series of side-by-side spa treatments with plenty of time floating in the pool.
The emails we sent in advance of the trip were all exclamation points and promises. Totes getting a mud bas but feeling conflicted about a body scrub, maybe a facial? Ooh, the mud bath is included. Yes to a free mud bath and to this little getaway.
(30:00)
Once we arrived we texted cheerful updates to mutual friends who weren't on the trip. Hi from the spa in Napa! Wow, we're the worst. [Laughs] On social media we posted cute photos of our matching animal print shoes and beautiful scenes of the sun glinting on the surface of that 92 degrees natural hot spring pool. By all outward appearances we were two healthy, wealthy women on a gorgeous getaway. This was the stuff of stereotypical girls' trips, the sort of extravagant vacation we had dreamed about taking when we first met as broke 20-somethings.
Years deep into our friendship with so many of our professional aspirations starting to come to fruition and big pieces of our lives starting to snap into place our unhurried hours at the spa should've been every bit as idyllic as the photos made it out to be but we were miserable."
Aminatou: "We were miserable in that pretending you aren't miserable way, lonely behind our respective emotional walls. Just a few hours in the trip was feeling like an awkward family reunion or a sad couple's retreat, the sort of trying too hard getaway designed to revive a fading relationship. We were not a romantic couple or estranged family members but the stakes were just as high for us. We had met five years earlier and had quickly become essential in each other's lives. You know that clip of Oprah talking about Gayle?"
Oprah: She is the mother I never had. She is the sister everybody would want. She is the friend that everybody deserves. I don't know a better person.
Aminatou: "That was the level of teary-eyed appreciation we had for each other. We knew each other's secrets and snack preferences as if they were our own. Most of our friends considered us an inseparable duo. We had also started a podcast together so lots of strangers now thought of us that way too. In our past nothing about our friendship felt forced. We loved being and being known as each other's core person but over the last year a space had opened up between us. This trip was an acknowledgment that our friendship was failing. We had hoped that some bonding time and superficial luxuries just might save it.
(32:10)
The next day at brunch we struggled to find things to say. We had quickly agreed to stay in and watch a movie the night before because it meant a few hours when we didn't have to carefully choose which anecdotes to share about our lives as we avoided topics that felt too loaded. But now here we were in the light of day sitting across from each other. We talked about the weather, the food, the baby-smooth quality of our post-spa skin. The banter felt forced and we both knew we weren't comfortable enough for deeper topics."
Ann: "Later when it came time for our free mud baths we were shy about disrobing in front of each other. This was a first. We'd been in spa settings and thrift store changing rooms together countless times. As we sank into our respective tubs Aminatou exhaled in relaxation. Then she glanced over and noticed Ann was struggling with the heat."
Aminatou: "Ann is basically a lizard. She's always either freezing or boiling."
Ann: "Aminatou, a more experienced spa-goer, realized she had forgotten to warn Ann that the mud bath feels very hot and claustrophobic. Aminatou hadn't done it on purpose but she was convinced that in an earlier, better time in the friendship she would've remembered to check in with Ann about this. Suddenly Aminatou was not relaxed either. It felt like a metaphor for our dysfunctional dynamic.
At dinner that night we acknowledged that things between us had gotten bad and we wanted them to be better. There were long, uncomfortable pauses. Usually our conversations relied on us knowing everything about each other and we had stopped offering up those details many months ago. Ann didn't get into her financial woes or the knot of feelings she had about moving in with her formerly long-distance boyfriend. It wasn't until the ride back to the city that Aminatou mentioned to Ann that she had been dating someone she really liked for months. This was the first time Ann was hearing his name.
(33:50)
On the ride home we told ourselves that things felt better than they had before, that this was progress, the beginning of a return to a time when our friendship felt like steady breathing, both natural and crucial, important and on autopilot. At least we admitted to each other that our friendship needs work, we both thought. It's a start. We didn't say these things out loud though. Lodged beneath our ribcages was the truth: we had both been dreading this trip because we suspected a beautiful, distraction-free setting would highlight just how wide the space between us had become and we had been right. We didn't have the words for what was happening to us or what had happened to our friendship."
Aminatou: "If you listen to our podcast you are probably screaming right now not only because we are woman who seem to have a lot of words for everything else but also because our show is premised on us being tight-knit besties. Stay sexy and don't fake your friendship to keep your podcast afloat! You might feel like we played you. But the truth is like any long-term intimate relationship a friendship like ours is complicated. It's far more accurate to say we played ourselves by spending so many months pretending that things were okay when clearly they were not. This isn't the only time we have lacked a vocabulary for the dynamic and milestones and ups and downs of our relationship. In the past when the world failed to provide a label for something we were experiencing as friends we often supplied our own words for it. We came up with our own shorthand for the powerful decision to invest in our friends the way we invest in ourselves. It's called Shine Theory. Such a great concept that everyone from Victoria Secret to Reese Witherspoon has tried to co-opt it. We talk about our messy, beautiful, interconnected social groups as a friend web. The good stuff, we've always been adept at finding ways of describing it.
But it has been much harder for us to find a language for the difficult parts. The frustration of giving more to a friend than they're giving back, the bridgeable gaps in even the closest of interracial friendships, the dynamic of pushing each other away even as we're trying to reconnect, the struggle to find true peace with a long-term friendship that is changing. We have even lacked a name for the kind of friendship we have. Words like best friend or BFF don't capture the adult emotional work we've put into this relationship. We now call it a big friendship because it's one of the most affirming and most complicated relationships that a human life can hold.
(36:10)
We would love to tell you that after we returned from our sad spa weekend we quickly patched things up and got on with our legendary friendship but the truth is it took a long time and lot of false-starts. Five years later we are still figuring out how to stay centered in each other's lives. We are still searching for the right words. And honestly we have a lot of compassion for our past selves stewing in those separate mud baths. We understand why it was so hard for us to figure out what was happening to us. At a cultural level there's a lot of lip service about friendship being wonderful and important but not a lot of social support for protecting what's precious about it.
Even deep-lasting friendships like ours need protection and sometimes repair. So how did we go from being the most important people in each other's lives to near strangers and back again? And why would anyone put themselves through the torture of trying to stay in a complicated friendship for the long haul? That's the story we're about to tell you."
Ann: "We are telling it with one voice and in one narrative thread because we want you to always feel secure that hey, we are still friends. And we are. Figuring out how to share our story in a wee voice also helped us to find the overlap in our experiences. There are of course some clear differences between us and places where our stories diverge so in these places we refer to ourselves as Aminatou and Ann separately. We are not sharing our story because we think it's exceptional; quite the opposite. We've spent so much time examining our friendship because we believe many of its joys and pitfalls are pretty common. We hope that you won't think of us as experts, you'll soon find out why we aren't, but rather as two people who love each other very much. Two friends who ten years in are still finding so much delight and mystery at the heart of their relationship, who are searching together for the words to describe both the expansive possibilities and the painful challenges of friendship. Who are obsessing over the question of how to stay in each other's lives forever. We have been enlightened and humbled to tell this story to each other and now we are honored to tell it to you.":
(38:15)
Aminatou: You can find out more about Big Friendship including where to buy it wherever you buy your books at bigfriendship.com.
Ann: We are also doing a series of virtual events in July to celebrate the book's launch and you can find out about more of those at Big Friendship as well. For just a little sneak peek on July 13th we'll be in conversation with Samin Nosrat. July 14th we're having a UK book launch with Ada's List, an amazing group of tech-savvy women and non-binary people. On July 14th we're doing a Death, Sex and Money live stream with the fabulous Anna sale. On July 16th we'll be in conversation with Mari Andrew and on July 27th we'll be chatting with Alicia Garza in a chat hosted by the King County Library System. So lots of good things and we will keep that page of our website updated. We would love to see you on the Internet, on the Zoom, because we are still Zooming. Bigfriendship.com. See you on the Internet.
Aminatou: See you on the Internet boo-boo!
Ann: Hey, congrats on writing a book! [Laughter]
Aminatou: You must be talking to someone else. Bye!
Ann: Bye!
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favs. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back, leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf and you can buy our book Big Friendship anywhere you buy books. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We have editorial support from Laura Bertocci. Our producer is Jordan Bailey. This podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.